When I was taken aside that day
I had the sense of election:
they dressed my head in a fishnet
and plaited leafy twigs through meshes
so my vision was a bird’s
at the heart of a thicket
and I spoke as I moved
like a voice from a shaking bush.
King of the ditchbacks,
I went with them obediently
to the edge of a pigeon wood –
deciduous canopy, screened wain of evening
we lay beneath in silence.
No birds came, but I waited
among briars and stones, or whispered
or broke the watery gossamers
if I moved a muscle.
‘Come back to us,’ they said, ‘in harvest,
when we hide in the stooked corn,
when the gundogs can hardly retrieve
what’s brought down.’ And I saw myself
rising to move in that dissimulation,
top-knotted, masked in sheaves, noting
the fall of birds: a rich young man
leaving everything he had
for a migrant solitude.
IA hurry of bell-notes
flew over morning hush
and water-blistered cornfields,
an escaped ringing
that stopped as quickly
as it started.
Sunday
,the silence breathed
and could not settle back
for a man had appeared
at the side of the field
with a bow-saw, held
stiffly up like a lyre.
He moved and stopped to gaze
up into hazel bushes,
angled his saw in,
pulled back to gaze again
and move on to the next.
‘I know you, Simon Sweeney,
for an old Sabbath-breaker
who has been dead for years.’
‘Damn all you know,’ he said,
his eye still on the hedge
and not turning his head.
‘I was your mystery man
and am again this morning.
Through gaps in the bushes,
your First Communion face
would watch me cutting timber.
When cut or broken limbs
of trees went yellow, when
woodsmoke sharpened air
or ditches rustled
you sensed my trail there
as if it had been sprayed.
It left you half afraid.
When they bade you listen
in the bedroom dark
to wind and rain in the trees
and think of tinkers camped
under a heeled-up cart
you shut your eyes and saw
a wet axle and spokes
in moonlight, and me
streaming from the shower,
headed for your door.’
Sunlight broke in the hazels,
the quick bell-notes began
a second time. I turned
at another sound:
a crowd of shawled women
were wading the young corn,
their skirts brushing softly.
Their motion saddened morning.
It whispered to the silence,
‘Pray for us, pray for us,’
it conjured through the air
until the field was full
of half-remembered faces,
a loosed congregation
that straggled past and on.
As I drew behind them
I was a fasted pilgrim,
light-headed, leaving home
to face into my station.
‘Stay clear of all processions!’
Sweeney shouted at me
but the murmur of the crowd
and their feet slushing through
the tender, bladed growth
had opened a drugged path
I was set upon.
I trailed those early-risers
fallen into step
before the smokes were up.
The quick bell rang again.
III was parked on a high road, listening
to peewits and wind blowing round the car
when something came to life in the driving mirror,
someone walking fast in an overcoat
and boots, bareheaded, big, determined
in his sure haste along the crown of the road
so that I felt myself the challenged one.
The car door slammed. I was suddenly out
face to face with an aggravated man
raving on about nights spent listening for
gun butts to come cracking on the door,
yeomen on the rampage, and his neighbour
among them, hammering home the shape of things.
‘Round about here you overtook the women,’
I said, as the thing came clear. ‘Your
Lough Derg Pilgrim
haunts me every time I cross this mountain –
as if I am being followed, or following.
I’m on my road there now to do the station.’
‘O holy Jesus Christ, does nothing change?’
His head jerked sharply side to side and up
like a diver’s surfacing,
then with a look that said,
who is this cubanyhow
, he took cognizance againof where he was: the road, the mountain top,
and the air, softened by a shower of rain,
worked on his anger visibly until:
‘It is a road you travel on your own.
I who learned to read in the reek of flax
and smelled hanged bodies rotting on their gibbets
and saw their looped slime gleaming from the sacks –
hard-mouthed Ribbonmen and Orange bigots
made me into the old fork-tongued turncoat
who mucked the byre of their politics.
If times were hard, I could be hard too.
I made the traitor in me sink the knife.
And maybe there’s a lesson there for you,
whoever you are, wherever you come out of,
for though there’s something natural in your smile
there’s something in it strikes me as defensive.’
‘The angry role was never my vocation,’
I said. ‘I come from County Derry,
where the last marching bands of Ribbonmen
on Patrick’s Day still played their Hymn to Mary.
Obedient strains like theirs tuned me first
and not that harp of unforgiving iron
the Fenians strung. A lot of what you wrote
I heard and did: this Lough Derg station,
flax-pullings, dances, fair-days, crossroads chat
and the shaky local voice of education.
All that. And always, Orange drums.
And neighbours on the roads at night with guns.’
‘I know, I know, I know, I know,’ he said,
‘but you have to try to make sense of what comes.
Remember everything and keep your head.’
‘The alders in the hedge,’ I said, ‘mushrooms,
dark-clumped grass where cows or horses dunged,
the cluck when pith-lined chestnut shells split open
in your hand, the melt of shells corrupting,
old jampots in a drain clogged up with mud – ’
But now Carleton was interrupting:
‘All this is like a trout kept in a spring
or maggots sown in wounds –
another life that cleans our element.
We are earthworms of the earth, and all that
has gone through us is what will be our trace.’
He turned on his heel when he was saying this
and headed up the road at the same hard pace.
IIII knelt. Hiatus. Habit’s afterlife …
I was back among bead clicks and the murmurs
from inside confessionals, side altars
where candles died insinuating slight
intimate smells of wax at body heat.
There was an active, wind-stilled hush, as if
in a shell the listened-for ocean stopped
and a tide rested and sustained the roof.
A seaside trinket floated then and idled
in vision, like phosphorescent weed,
a toy grotto with seedling mussel shells
and cockles glued in patterns over it,
pearls condensed from a child invalid’s breath
into a shimmering ark, my house of gold
that housed the snowdrop weather of her death
long ago. I would stow away in the hold
of our big oak sideboard and forage for it
laid past in its tissue paper for good.
It was like touching birds’ eggs, robbing the nest
of the word
wreath
, as kept and dry and secret
as her name which they hardly ever spoke
but was a white bird trapped inside me
beating scared wings when
Health of the Sickfluttered its
pray for us
in the litany.
A cold draught blew under the kneeling boards.
I thought of walking round
and round a space utterly empty,
utterly a source, like the idea of sound
or like the absence sensed in swamp-fed air
above a ring of walked-down grass and rushes
where we once found the bad carcass and scrags of hair
of our dog that had disappeared weeks before.